inkpaintwordplay

[inkpaintwordplay]

INKTOBER 2020. What an exhausting year it has been. I was looking forward to Inktober this year as something to be a constant. Everything is in total chaos right now, but I hope the autumn will chill things out a bit. Last year I started doing the drawing a day Inktober challenge only to fall off about a third of the way through. I really didn't see the point of it while I was dealing with other usual life stuff, & I wasn't enjoying the process. This year I realized the point is solely to sustain the daily creative act. Distraction is the greatest enemy of the artist, & there are about a million fucking distractions right now. Having the daily prompts from Inktober is a good way to keep at it. Last year I was putting a bit too much effort & detail into the drawings, so I am keeping it pretty simple this time around. I am finding I am more productive the more confines I have to my creativity. The creative force is so unweildy, it feels helpful to provide it as much structure as possible within which to wiggle & writhe. I've created this idea of elementarily drawn black and white charcters with keyboard symbols for eyes & smiles plastered on their faces. It's always raining in their world. I am choosing one Radiohead song for each daily prompt to serve as the backdrop for each day's drawing. Last Inktober, each of the prompts were connected to a song, but I was spending way too much time trying to research songs to fit each prompt & didn't even like any of the music. Radiohead is one of my favorite bands, & their themes & tones of alienation & techological overwhelm fit sweetly with this year's wonderful political & social climate. Their discography is deep enough that I have been able to find at least one song that will loosely fit with the day's theme. If I couldn't find one that fit lyrically, I was able to find songs that sounded something inspired by the prompt. That was pretty fun to do, & I have been just shuffle playing Radiohead's collection the last few days to further brainstorm ideas. Even after listening to the band for years, I don't know a lot of the lyrics because of Thom Yorkes ethereal vocal stylings. It's been fun to look up the lyrics to each song & find out if the words are actually anything close to what they sound like. I think also incorporating the lyrics into the drawings is cool because there are a lot of weird wordplay or phrases that people wouldn't necessarily place with Radiohead's music upno reading, but are still intriguing on their own. I'm doing the drawings on a small, in part because it requires less effort, & in part because I am going to be traveling a good deal during the month & want to be able to bring my tools wherever I go. I'm drawing on 5x7 notecards (cheap & easy), a mechanical pencil & eraser for underdrawing, & three Copic markers for the inking, with a small clipboard as my meager easel. I have always been a proponent of simple materials, & like to keep my own artistic style pretty smash & grab easy. I like to make a mess & feel the materials on my fingers. I don't really have the patience for artistic detail & have so many ideas that I want to just bang them out as much as possible. When I was younger I would make these hyperrealistic drawings, but it seemed silly to do after cell phone photography came out. I started learning photoshop & illustrator & tried drawing on tablets in the past, but just couldn't get into any of it. It felt inauthentic to me or something. I would rather be playing around in reality than scraping my face against a screen. Since our ability to play around reality right now is greatly restricted, hopefully I can actually finish the 31 drawings this time!

[inkpaintwordplay]

Today I am thinking about how I can be more mobile. During quarantine I have developed some pretty good routines artistically, spiritually, & otherwise, but I'm aware that this hermetic way of life is not doing to last forever. I also want to be able to get out of town more, & be able to leave on a whim without sacrificing creativity. My lover lives a ways south of me so there's commuting involved. When the world reopens I am planning to go back to what I call the juggler's life, where I juggle a bunch of different part time jobs, & so my work places may be varied & all over town. I came up with a pretty nice setup for my hatchback where I just put the seats down & put the cushion of my papsan chair in the back. There is plenty of room for me to sit in there cross legged & work on whatever I am doing. It works with or without the back door closed so I can get fresh air or privacy. Today I went to the park to go for a walk & do my journaling, then I came back to the car & had a phone call with an artist friend of mine, had lunch, worked on some IG stuff, & even started experimenting with the vehicle as a mobile recording studio. I need to start making music again, but the walls where I live are paper thin & my downstairs neighbor is always home so I can't really do much recording or experimenting. I've always loved singing in my car, & Spotify recently came out with, Soundtrap a cloud based recording app, that I think has some potential to do rough recordings on the go. I was pretty psyched to start messing around with that & it's nice being able to just drive anywhere & sing in my car. Anyway, in this pic is my portable speaker, a bunch of notebooks, my planner, lunchbox, my art bag, & a New Yorker bag containing the blanket I always leave in my car. Bonus that the cushion is orange because my car is a Volkswagen Rabbit & so that mofo loves to munch on carrots. The back folds up nicely &there is a cover behind the seats that covers what would normally be the trunk area, but I think I want to eventually tint out the windows so I can leave everything sprawled out & don't have to pack it up each time.

[inkpaintwordplay]

So It Begins

I’ve intended to start an art blog to track what I am working on. My intention is to track progress of different projects, vent about issues, compare supplies, & basically just let my mind splay out on the page. Tumblr seems to sync pretty well with Instagram where I have been posting my arts.  I am posting three pieces a week of different ideas for bodies of work. Instagram has character limits that don’t allow me to ramble on like I like to do. I’m assuming that it is also good for SEO to have a web of different sites connecting each other, but that’s just an assumption my spider mind makes. I have an Etsy shop going & Instagram, so this is the third bullet in my revolver. Eventually I’d like to have my own website, but you can’t beat this stuff to do its own marketing for you.  Once I build these platforms then I’ll create a Shopify or Squarespace website. At this point I just get overwhelmed with it & would rather be spending time on my art.